MAN VS WILD
Sloth bears are short-sighted and easily alarmed. In Buldhana, Maharashtra, a river has dried up, a road has cut their reserve in two. As the bears wander in search of water, they are running into, mauling, killing villagers
Once upon a time, a group of bears lived in a forest. Every evening, they would take a walk in search of fruits, insects or berries. They saw huts amid the trees, but never went in.
They liked to walk along the river, so they could dine and sip at the same time.
Then a highway was built and they couldn’t walk in that part of the forest any more. The river started to dry up, and they didn’t know where to go.
They could still find food in the forest, but they now had to walk further and further in search of water. And that’s how, one dark night, one of the bears found itself at the edge of Karawand village.
Shatrugan Khandelkar, 35, was installing a new sprinkler in his tur dal field. It was getting late; he knew he should head home. The birds had stopped chirping.
Khandelkar heard a twig snap, looked up and saw something move among the tall trees. It was big. His heart began to race. He dropped the sprinkler and took a few steps towards the forest. He can’t explain why. “I thought it was nothing,” he says. “I wanted to see what was there.”
Standing under a tree, a drop of something thick and gooey fell onto his shoulder. When he looked up, a beast 8 ft tall dropped from the tree with a grunt.
Its claws dug into his thighs and chest. Khandelkar tried to rip the animal’s ear off, pushed at it with all his might, got loose and made a run for the village. This was less than six weeks ago. “I hid my face. That’s what we have been told to do,” he says. “We don’t fear leopards because they only eat our livestock. But the bears... they just attack.” Six villages lie on the edges of the Dnyanganga Wildlife Sanctuary in Maharashtra’s Buldhana district. No one had ever died of a bear attack here until 2012. Two more deaths were reported last year. Since January, 4 more people have died, and another 21 have been injured.
Survivors have been left with faces mauled, arms and legs ripped to the bone, eyes gouged out.
Amid escalating attacks, the forest department has reached out to researchers. Last month, the International Union for Conservation of Nature was invited to study the problem and suggest a way forward. Their report will be ready in a year.
Meanwhile, warning signs have been nailed to trees. The sloth bear is protected, so it cannot be killed.
There are 5,000 people living in what is, essentially, their expanded dining room. To make matters worse, diminishing rainfall has prompted farmers to switch from the knee-high paddy to corn and tur dal, both of which grow to about the same height as the bears, offering the perfect cover for the foraging animal, and making attacks more likely as bear and man come face to face unexpectedly.
Except, they shouldn’t have to. After all, there are over 1,000 sloth bears in Maharashtra, and 20,000 across the Indian subcontinent. The Dnyanganga sanctuary is estimated to hold about 60 of the shortsighted, easily startled animals. The sanctuary is more than large enough to accommodate them. But it isn’t healthy enough.
“Only about 10% of India’s wildlife habitats retain their original form. The rest has been degraded or fragmented because of human population growth and unplanned or uncoordinated development,” says Anish Andheria, president of the nonprofit Wildlife Conservation Trust.
“When development does not take into account negative impact on wildlife, the result is a growing interface between wild animals and people. Under stressful situations, both parties behave abnormally.”
The face-off in Buldhana is another dubious first in the expanding landscape of man-animal conflict in India. Mauled children are dropping out of school, afraid to venture far from the house. Others are trying to rebuild their lives with facial scars that have neighbours shrinking away.
“We do not have toilets in the village, or electricity, but we are forced to stay indoors after sunset. What’s worse, the attacks have now begun occurring in broad daylight,” says Lal Singh Pawar, 45, who lost an eye to a sloth bear last year.
Strangely, two villages — Borala and Devhari — located in the heart of the reserve have seen no attacks in over a decade, and no deaths at all. There is one key difference between Pawar’s Karawand village and these two. Borala and Devhari line the banks of the dried-up river; while Karawand and its neighbouring villages share a massive 2.5-acre lake and 22 wells.
The forest department has begun constructing fences between these villages and the forest and has asked the state government to sanction anti-bear trenches.
“Due to their weak eyesight, the bears would fall into the trenches and we would then re-release them into the sanctuary,” says range forest officer Ganeshrao Zole.
This is one of those fables with a moral at the end, only we haven’t got to the end yet.